This narrative hypertext poem creates a web of semantic and spacial associations between short excerpts from interviews of refugees living in London. The ethnographic dimension of this piece lends weight to the work as one realizes that these snippets of text are from people’s life stories. The keywords that float on the screen and pull up narrative fragments can be understood as tags in a database. Some common ones (listed in Mencía’s site) are:

This work by Mencia is an exquisite combination of visual poetry, onomatopoeia, sound poetry, and Flash animation. Based on linguistic transcriptions of birdsongs, Mencia records people singing them and attaches the recordings to visual poems built out of the shape of the birds and the language of those transcriptions. An added interest is that the birdsongs (twice removed from the source) don’t match the visual representation of the bird in this poem, so by giving the reader the ability to select different birds, they can attempt to find the matching sound. Or you can turn them all on and attempt to sort them in your mind.